Is It Bad to Get Pregnant Again Within Firstyear
For older mothers, it can feel like there's little time to waste before trying for another child. But in that location are real risks linked to getting pregnant over again also presently. Lauren Bates/Getty Images hide caption
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Lauren Bates/Getty Images
For older mothers, information technology can feel like there'south little time to waste earlier trying for another kid. But there are real risks linked to getting pregnant again too soon.
Lauren Bates/Getty Images
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Many older commencement-fourth dimension moms confront a dilemma when it comes to baby No. 2. The clock is ticking louder than always. But doctors advise waiting at least a yr and a one-half after giving birth earlier conceiving again.
This is the standard advice, based on multiple studies and public health guidelines. Just deciding when to try again can be a difficult decision — weighing medical risk against infertility risk. Now at that place are some new information points to factor in. A paper published Monday in the periodical JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed medical records from nearly 150,000 Canadian pregnancies to tease out how a mother's historic period influences the furnishings of a shorter-than-recommended interval between pregnancies.
For older moms in a hurry, the bad news is that the written report adds show that conceiving within 12 months of a nativity does mean heightened health risks for both mother and kid. But epidemiologist Laura Schummers, who led the research while at Harvard and is at present a post-doctoral boyfriend at the University of British Columbia, says in that location's good news for yous here as well:
"The optimal spacing window that nosotros found was one to two years later the delivery of one child until the formulation of the next pregnancy," she says. "That'due south when nosotros found the lowest gamble for both mothers and babies." And, she adds, that's short compared to some previous studies that had suggested the optimal await was between eighteen months and upwards to v years.
Past research has found a clear link betwixt brusque "interpregnancy intervals" and increased risk of health problems for mother and baby, including premature birth. But why? The argue, Schummers says, revolves around whether the curt interval is a direct biological crusade of the risks, or whether it it is itself a result of other forces at work in the mother's life — for example, a lack of access to wellness care and unintended pregnancies.
Because older women are likelier to plan their pregnancies and have better admission to care, Schummers and colleagues hypothesized that those mothers would non incur as much gamble every bit younger women do if they had babies close together.
They found out they were wrong.
"In fact," Schummers says, "nosotros found that there were risks of agin infant outcomes for women of all ages.
"The risks to the babies were higher among younger women, which was consequent with the squad'southward hypothesis. Merely risks to the mothers were college amid older women — indeed, only older mothers incurred higher risks to their ain health by getting pregnant again so soon.
After accounting for other factors that could drive these numbers, Schummers says, the stats shake out like this:
• For women 35 years or older who conceived simply six months later on a birth, vi.ii per thousand experienced serious illness or injury, including death. Wait 18 months and that risk dropped to 2.6 per per m. So, pocket-sized absolute numbers but a dramatic difference.
• A "severe adverse infant outcome" includes stillbirth and being born very early or very small. Among women ages xx to 34, those who conceived later on just six months had 20 babies per yard with those severe outcomes; the risk drops to 14 per thousand amongst those who waited eighteen months.
• Among women 35 years or older, there were 21 astringent baby outcomes per thousand among those who waited but half dozen months; the risk drops to eighteen per yard amidst those who waited 18 months.
"This shows yous both the relationship between pregnancy spacing and the increased risk," Schummers says, "but as well that older women tend to have a college baseline take a chance of many of these outcomes at all pregnancy spacing lengths."
The research turned upwardly a similar pattern for premature birth: A short pregnancy interval raises the risk for all women, but particularly for younger women. The gamble for them dropped from 53 per thousand at a half-dozen-calendar month interval to 32 per chiliad at an xviii-calendar month interval. For women over 35, the hazard dropped from 50 per thou at six months to 36 per thousand after 18 months.
Information technology seems like common sense that a woman'south body may need more six months to fully recover from edifice a baby and giving nascence, only the bodily mechanism backside the risks of short pregnancy intervals is not fully clear.
The leading theory, Schummers says, is that nutrients like iron or folate could be depleted in the female parent's trunk. But more research is needed to run into if that theory holds in developed countries like the Usa and Canada, or if there are other mechanisms that have not yet been identified.
For now, she says, her team hopes these new findings can assistance women make decisions within their own personal contexts, and in consultation with their medical teams. The data may be specially helpful for older women, she says, because they more oft make up one's mind to have short pregnancy intervals on purpose.
"And so if yous're making that kind of decision on purpose," she says, "it's easier to say, 'Y'all know, let's wait some other three months.' "
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/01/663181674/how-long-should-older-moms-wait-before-getting-pregnant-again
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